Companies try to intuit what a good measure of happiness for their users might be and, by building their sites to prioritize those metrics, manipulate their users over time. On Facebook, once the company started rewarding its employees if they increased the amount of time users spent on the app, users started seeing more video and news content in their feeds. As was apparent in the election, rewarding content that sparked users’ emotions helped give rise to an entire industry of fake-news sites.
